It is likely that you are developing some form of (web/RESTful) API, and in case it is publicly-facing (or even when it’s internal), you normally want to rate-limit it somehow. That is, to limit the number of requests performed over a period of time, in order to save resources and protect from abuse. This can probably be achieved on web-server/load balancer level with some clever configurations, but usually you want the rate limiter to be client-specific (i.e. each client of your API sohuld have a separate rate limit), and the way the client is identified varies. It’s probably still possible to do it on the load balancer, but I think it makes sense to have it on the application level. I’ll use spring-mvc for the example, but any web framework has a good way to plug an interceptor. So here’s an example of a spring-mvc interceptor: @Component public class RateLimitingInterceptor extends HandlerInterceptorAdapter { private static final Logger logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger(RateLimitingInterceptor.class); @Value("${rate.limit.enabled}") private boolean enabled; @Value("${rate.limit.hourly.limit}") private int hourlyLimit; private Map<String, Optional<SimpleRateLimiter>> limiters = new ConcurrentHashMap<>(); @Override public boolean preHandle(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response, Object handler) throws Exception { if (!enabled) { return true; } String clientId = request.getHeader("Client-Id"); // let non-API requests pass if (clientId == null) { return true; } SimpleRateLimiter rateLimiter = getRateLimiter(clientId); boolean allowRequest = limiter.tryAcquire(); if (!allowRequest) { response.setStatus(HttpStatus.TOO_MANY_REQUESTS.value()); } response.addHeader("X-RateLimit-Limit", String.valueOf(hourlyLimit)); return allowRequest; } private SimpleRateLimiter getRateLimiter(String clientId) { if (limiters.containsKey(clientId)) { return limiters.get(clientId); } else { synchronized(clientId.intern()) { // double-checked locking to avoid multiple-reinitializations if (limiters.containsKey(clientId)) { return limiters.get(clientId); } SimpleRateLimiter rateLimiter = createRateLimiter(clientId); limiters.put(clientId, rateLimiter); return rateLimiter; } } } @PreDestroy public void...